Omo Iya Mi.

Words, As Fruit. #34

Apr 14, 2024

[Please be advised, this post touches on matters of death, and grief.

This post is also a journey story. So, short, it is not. But sweet, it is. This is word weaving.]

Please, won’t you come journey with me?

Grief rearranges you. Changes the composition of you. The way you think. The way one thought, connects to another, and connects to another after that.

Grief changes the way you see, the way you breathe, the way you pick up the phone and listen to the way the person on the other end of the line is breathing. Is it smooth? Is it jagged? Is it hollow? Is it calm? Is it heavy?

There are moments in life captured through the lens of grief. Moments you wish you could shake the feeling of, not because you don’t want to remember them, but because the rememory of them still causes ripples. Ripples that makes shock waves go through your body as if the moment, of that moment, is happening all over again. Then there are moments you can’t remember because grief has taken them. Stored them away for a rainy day, or a random morning when your heart is calm, your breath is steady, and you are open and able to receive a memory that brings you back to a moment, a moment that creates a new ripple…

One way energy can move around is by forming waves. For example, the waves you see at the beach are formed by energy from the wind. Light and sound also move in waves, though we can't see that directly. And the ripples that you see in the river are small waves carrying away the energy from where you threw the rock. 1

June 4, 2017 my father died. We had been estranged for some time and for at least four to five years prior to his passing, he had been battling leukemia. I still remember the morning my mother came to deliver the news of his passing. I knew something was wrong because not only had my sister come with her, but the way they walked through the front door, and entered into my one bedroom studio living room/office/kitchen, was careful. Cautious. Leery even. I remember the looming way in which my sister stood by the door, the heavy and quiet calm on my mother’s face, the gentle way she ushered me over to the couch and guided me to sit down. I remember the anguished silence that sucked all of the air out of the room. In hindsight, I remember feeling like I already knew what I didn’t know, and the parts of me that didn’t already know had just been waiting to find out.

What I can’t remember is what my mother said. There are few moments in life as staggering and emotionally deafening as the intersecting seconds just before, and immediately after, you learn someone you Love has died. Losing my father leveled me in ways that are still fresh, still visceral, still tender. His death didn’t just break me, it dismantled me. I became a kind of fragile I had never been, and still am.

Grief rearranges you…

The day my father died, was the day I re-met my Uncle. My father’s best friend. They met and grew up together in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria. I remember vividly, walking into the hospice care center where my father’s body, lying in his bed, was being kept cool for me. It was a four hour drive from Los Angeles to the hospice center. I walked in through the front door of the hospice center still dazed and, after being greeted by my Father’s doctor, my Uncle was the first face that I saw. For a short second, I was stunned because I thought it was my father. In that moment, my Uncle, with his round face, chocolate skin, expressive eyes, and locs, looked like him. I don’t know what happened between that moment and the moment I found myself looking down at my father, still in his bed. I remember being stunned, again, as I placed a palm against his now cold and clammy cheek, and swore I saw his chest rise. I know I saw his chest rise. The moments followed were filled with the tears and breathless cries of a child saying, for the last time, hello and goodbye to her father’s physical body.

Grief rearranges you…

This year, June 2024, will mark 7 years since my father transitioned. Now more than ever, I understand why the word transition is used when talking about those who have passed on. I now know, in a way I didn’t before, how someone can be gone, and still be here. Like my Grandpapa, my Mother’s Father, I feel my Father’s presence in so many ways. One such way was this past Wednesday, April 10th. I’d woken up extremely earlier. I don’t think my mind ever went to sleep the night before. I haven’t, for weeks, been sleeping well, and some nights I barely sleep at all. As I went to go sit down on the couch, to read, or meditate, I hadn’t yet decided which, and sometimes reading and meditating are one in the same, I looked down at a book sitting on the bottom ledge of my coffee table. The book was washed in a stream of soft morning light coming from the kitchen window. This book, ‘I can’t stand to see you cry’ is a photo book by visual artist and educator, Rahim Fortune. The book’s cover is reminiscent of the photo that introduced me to Fortune’s work.

In 2021, a friend reposted a cover image from the Sunday, January 24, 2021, New York Times, At Home Section. 2 It was this photo that led me, and introduced me to Rahim Fortune.

Rahim Fortune, January 24, 2021, New York Times, At Home

“The theme [of the photo] was intimacy, after nearly 5 months spent apart during the first year of our relationship due to a pandemic and my fathers illness.

To me this photo represents the immeasurable dark year we just lived through and the toll it took on love and intimacy.

“Hold the ones you love close.”

Rahim Fortune, cover art, ‘I can’t stand to see you cry’ published 2021

Grief rearranges you…and teaches you.

Despite its intensity and severity, I do not believe that grief comes with ill intention. Grief does not come to make shells of us, to hold us hostage, and rob us of our light and joy.

Grief is not an enemy, but for a period after my Father transitioned, I considered it as such. It was me, and grief in the ring, battling it out, round, after round, after round. I felt I had to fight it, overcome it, and get past it. Presently, I am still trying to decide if grief is something you ever get past. I have written in one of my journals that, “grief is what stays once the haze of mourning melts away”. In my writing I also use the light of morning as a metaphor for the eye opening heaviness of mourning.

My Mother says,

“For some losses the grief never goes away, never dissipates. Instead it transmutes, changes form, and changes you.”

I am always changing, but grief has by far been one of the most significant causes of this changing affect.

On the day of my Father’s passing, the re-meeting of my Uncle, my father’s best friend, was the re-meeting of parts of me that have, for many years, been dormant. When it comes to this idea of whose I am, I know that I am equal parts my Mother, Judy, and my Father, Idowu. But, because I did not have the opportunity to grow up closely with my father, I had not, until more recent years, been able to learn and know these pieces of me, that are also him, intimately. I have also not had the opportunity to intimately know aspects of my Father’s culture. Despite being raised in america, my Mother made sure to cultivate within me a deep understanding and respect for West African culture, and history. My Father is of the Yoruba nation. My full name, aside from my first middle name, Isis, is distinctly Yoruba. Yoruba, like most West African nations, are extremely spiritual. I’d argue that this is the case for most African nations across the continent, and diaspora. It is also the case that, family, village, and the interconnectedness of life, all life, human, earth and otherwise, is a corner stone of culture and society for indigenous nations.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton co-opted the phrase, taken from an African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”, and used it for the title of her first book, ‘It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us’. We know from america’s history, the current state of politics, and Clinton’s current stance on the genocide taking place in Palestine, within which over 14,000 children have been martyred, that Clinton’s belief in this sentiment isn’t a belief at all. But I digress…

My Uncle is not my blood Uncle. He is my Father’s best friend, but my Uncle is my Uncle because my Father is his Omo Iya Mi.

Omo Iya Mi translates in english to, ‘My Mother’s Child’.

My Uncle is not my Father but I am his child. My Auntie, my Uncle’s wife, is not my Mother, but I am her child.

When my Father died, and I re-met my Uncle, this was the rebirthing of a relationship. A reestablishing of a bond. The regeneration of a connective tissue that not only tethers blood family to blood family, but also tethers one Mother’s child, to another Mother’s child.

Though these bonds have been stretched, manipulated, tested and worn. They will never sever.

There is a story my mother tells about how when I was very young I approached a woman and began talking with her — I use talking very loosely as I believe I was only about 2 or 3 years old at the time this incident took place. When my mother began having the conversation with me, again, about not talking to strangers, she says I explained to her that the woman was not a stranger because, “Mommy, she’s somebodies Mommy.” To this day my Mother can’t help but laugh, and admit, I had a point. This is still a point I wish more of us would not only understand, but know, accept and live in the spirit of its true.

Last Sunday while out running errands I had a moment which further brought into focus this truth. As I was getting out of my car to go into the grocery store, a father and his son were exiting their own car, parked right next to mine. As I began walking across the parking lot, headed up to the store’s entrance, I hear the Father say,

“Oh, are you going to the store with her today?”

I turn around to see the little boy — his name is Marco and he is 2 — running up to me, his little arm and tiny hand outstretched, reaching to grab a hold of mine. The Father looks from his son to me, smiling, and that is permission enough for me. I stretch out my hand to meet his, and Marco and I proceed, walking hand-in-hand, through the store entrance, picking up a basket along the way. Marco and I continue up the first isle of the store, together, before he lets go of my hand to go in search of “ice cream”. He has been repeating “ice cream, ice cream, ice cream” since we grasped hands in the parking lot. When I reach the refrigerated food section, with the milk and yogurt, I see him again, jumping around, excited to have found his “ice cream”. This is what he calls yogurt. Marco comes bouncing over to me, and his Father realizes he forgot his wallet in the car. There is an agreement, via an exchange of glances, where in he and I know it is safe for Marco to stay with me, while he goes to the car for his wallet. Marco barely notices, and we proceed to explore the flavors of “ice cream”. His Father, whom Marco calls Dada, returns and Marco, now fully excited, satisfied, and finished with his grocery shopping, gives me a full body wave “bye! bye!”, because his hands, and arms, are full with his selection of “ice cream”. Marco’s Father smiles, wishes me a beautiful Sunday and I, being me, stand in front of the refrigerator section promising myself not to cry. Of course I do, and these tear, are tears of Love and Joy.

One of my middle names is, Adedayo (or, if written with the correct accents, Adédayọ̀). It means, ‘the crown or royalty became joyful’. My full first name, ẸniafẹBiafẹ, means ‘the one to be loved like the wind/air.’

“Pay attention to what sits inside of yourself and watches you.”

— Lucille Clifton

For the last several years, grief is what sits inside, and watches me. Joy is also there. And, always, there is Love.

If ever you here reading, think to ask me, ‘Ẹniafẹ, why is writing and telling about Love so important to you?’, this is why:

Love is, “a type of generational wealth we don’t talk nearly enough about.”

Love is the beginning and ending of all things.

Love is both the medicine, the weapon, and the salve/solve.

Love burns bridges, to create paths.

Love is our only protection against heartlessness, soullessness, darkness, evil, and hate.

Love is what remains when there is nothing else left.

I am Love. You are Love. Children who then grow up to be adults are Love.

Are you Loving yourself?

Are you Loving your children?

Are you Loving the children of other mothers?

On the same morning, April 10, 2024, I caught the light as it streamed through the window and washed over the cover of Rahim Fortune’s photo book, ‘I can’t stand to see you cry.’, these series of rememories came flooding through me. The words here have been in the process of weaving ever since.

Rememory is what Toni Morrison describes as, ‘recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past’.

Within the course of this flooding, and remembering, I went searching through a folder of saved emails between my Father and I. In this folder I came across an email dated April 10, 2010.

The email reads,

Dear Bia,

how are you, and how is your weekend coming along so far. you probably wonder who is that. well, it’s you, it’s one of the names that i also call you sometimes when i talk about you to my friends. It came from the long names of great meanings that i named you. It is short form of the name “Biafe” which means like the “Wind” or “Air”, an element without which one cannot exist.